Last RebellionReview

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Hit Maker finally takes a stab at the PS3, with a similar result as its PSP efforts. An eerily similar result.

By Sam Bishop

The partnership between NIS America and developer Hit Maker (not to be confused with Hitmaker -- no space -- the SEGA development wing responsible for Crazy Taxi and Virtua Tennis) has yielded some interesting results. I use the word "interesting" because I'm trying to be nice, but in truth, the boys and girls at the Japanese dev house are running the very real risk of becoming hilariously ironic given their moniker.

And, unfortunately, Last Rebellion isn't really doing them any favors. Their first PS3 effort is strikingly familiar territory, and I don't just mean in the sense that they've cranked out yet another lackluster RPG effort; this is clearly a game that was started as a PSP project and then just moved up. Everything from the presentation (literally nothing more than a pair of hand-painted portraits that don't even have moving mouths) to the graphics (terrible, blurry, low-res textures, all the geometric detail and complexity of a launch PS2 game) to the actual gameplay (no party, no equipment, no towns, no side quests... no kidding) all feel like an upscaled PSP game. It's absolutely inescapable.

Yes, this is supposed to be a PS3 game.

Also (mostly) inescapable? Enemy encounters, though that at least helps highlight one of the game's few interesting tidbits: the battle system. See, encounters aren't random, exactly; you can see the enemies running around in the world, and in very rare cases you can actually run past them, but because most of the areas are so small, there's either no room to run past or eventually an enemy that gives chase will catch up to you. Once you get even relatively close (no, you don't have to touch them, nor they you), the battle is on.

Last Rebellion's "story" sets up the idea rather early on that its two main characters, Aisha and Nine, share a single soul. That also means they share health and magic points but input battle commands separately and swap out every turn in battle. They also share CP, which is just a fancy way of saying they both burn points from a single pool to attack individual enemy parts. Attacking a head, then an arm, then a leg and so on "marks" them for subsequent turns, with more vulnerable bits having the mark "stick" for more turns (up to five) unless the enemy wastes a turn to cancel out the marks.

That's all well and good, but absolutely central to the game's combat is the idea of locking down a specific order to the attacks. It's a bit of a guessing game, but as you dole out strikes, if the right body part is hit in the right part of the overall sequence, you'll see BINGO flash on the screen and that particular part's attack order is saved. Notch a couple consecutive BINGOs and you'll get a COMBO, which adds to the Bonus Meter in the bottom-right of the screen. Bonuses take whatever the base experience was earned from a fight and multiply it, up to 999 percent, effectively, meaning with a little hunting and pecking, one can lay a beat down on a bunch of enemies to really maximize the amount of experience gained per fight.

No, really, it is a PS3 game, I promise.

But that's a process of elimination, really. The first time you'll encounter an enemy, their turn order is a complete mystery, and the only way to suss 'em out is to randomly start plugging away at an enemy. It almost feels like a little mini number puzzle every time you fight -- at least until you've figured out the full pattern, at which point you can press L1 to lock in that sequence and R1 to recall it at any time in future fights. There are multiple types of the same enemy, so you're not guaranteed to know every sequence even if the enemies look the same, but generally speaking, time spent plugging away at an enemy has long-lasting benefits.